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James Dean – film actor

Dean in Rebel Without a Cause

James Dean is famous today as the symbol of American youth in the 1950s and he still has many fans.
James Byron Dean was born on February 8, 1931 in Marion, Indiana. At the age of five James moved to Los Angeles from the Mid-west. His mother died of cancer three years later in July 1940; he returned to the Mid-west and lived on a relative’s farm.
After graduating in 1949 he left for Los Angeles, where he lived briefly with his father and stepmother and entered Santa Monica City College. The following year he transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dean started acting when he went to New York and got a part in a Broadway play. He did television plays and several more Broadway productions. He won the Daniel Blum Theatre World Award for ‘‘best newcomer’’ of the year for his role in The Immoralist.
In 1955 he made his two great films. In both East of Eden (film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel) and Rebel Without a Cause (with Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood) he played the role of a sensitive, unhappy young man, with his shirt collar turned up and his hands in his trouser pockets. For the role in East of Eden Dean won an Academy Award nomination.
In June 1955 and began work on Giant. He co-starred in this with Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. Completing Giant in September of that year, Dean was to start rehearsing for The Corn Is Green, a play for the National Broadcasting Company.
James Dean died on September 30, 1955 in a car accident. He was 24 years old. He was buried in Fairmount, Indiana, on October 8, 1955. Three thousand people attended his funeral.
After his death he became a cult figure, and fans have marveled for decades at his ability to duplicate their adolescent agony on screen.
His credo was to live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.
In February 1956 he was nominated for a Best Performance Oscar for his role in East of Eden. He was posthumously awarded the Golden Globe. He also received numerous foreign awards, including the French Crystal Star award and the Japanese Million Pearl award.
In 1995, Dean took the 42 place in the list of 100 Sexiest actors of the world according to the film magazine Empire. He ranked 33 in the list of 100 greatest movie stars of all time, according to the same publication two years later.
In 1999, the American Film Institute put the actor on the 18th place in the list of 100 Greatest Stars.

Feature films
1982 – Come Back To The Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean
1997 – James Dean: Race With Destiny (a.k.a. James Dean: Live Fast, Die Young) (Casper Van Dien as Dean)
2001 – James Dean (James Franco in the role of Dean)
2011 – Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean (feature film about the homosexual side of Dean’s life)
2015 – Life (Dane DeHaan as Dean)